July 31, 2009

USM to house children’s book collection
The University of Southern Mississippi has been awarded the right to be the repository for the archive of an international organization dedicated to children's literature. The Children's Literature Association, an organization of children’s literature scholars in North America, has announced that USM's de Grummond Children’s Literature Collection will receive the archive. USM bid on the right against several other universities with significant literature collections, said Carol Kiehl, dean of libraries.

Books’ new life in academia
The John Rylands Library has collections from other churches, though not many as intact as this. The books were brought down from the tower one by one via a human chain on the spiral staircase. They will now be conserved, boxed, and catalogued. “Church libraries like this are increasingly rare, and Nantwich is a particularly important example,” Mr Potten said. “We all agreed that these important and beautiful books are kept together as a collection,” to maintain for ever the link with St Mary’s and Nantwich.

Culture Digitally Documented
The Polytechnic of Namibia and the Utah Valley University (US) recently signed an agreement in terms of which the Digital Namibian Archive (DNA) was established in Windhoek. The DNA is an innovative project, which will develop a rich digital resource that reflects the diversity of voices and cultural stories of Namibian people. The two institutions, in conjunction with the Namibian National Archives, will digitise images, documents and voices of the Namibian people. The digital archive will make a rich resource accessible on the Internet that reflects the diversity of voices and cultural stories of the Namibian people to individuals throughout the country, the United States and the world. During the signing ceremony, Rector of the Polytechnic Dr Tjama Tjivikua said the project was one of the most important development projects.

Thirty-Five Documentary Properties Added to UNESCO's Memory of the World Register
Thirty-five items of documentary heritage of exceptional value have been added to UNESCO’s Memory of the World Register. This brings the total number of inscriptions since 1997 to 193. The Director-General of UNESCO, Koïchiro Matsuura, announced the inscription of these items on the recommendation of experts during a 3-day meeting of the International Advisory Committee (IAC) of UNESCO’s Memory of the World Programme which continues to 31 July in Bridgetown, Barbados. The Director-General also announced the winner of the 2009 UNESCO/Jikji Prize: the National Archives of Malaysia in recognition of its outreach, educational and training programmes in the area of preservation within the Asian region.

Germany's "Song of the Nibelungs" chosen for the Memory of the World program
The 12th century "Song of the Nibelungs" tells the tale of dragon slayer Siegfried, and how he is murdered by Hagen von Tronje, who hides the Nibelung treasure in the Rhine river; of King Gunther and Kriemhild of Burgundy, of Etzel, King of the Huns and of Iceland's Queen Bruenhild. It is a tale of love and revenge, of greed and defeat, of magical cloaks and dragon's blood, and treasures lost forever. The Bonn-based commission says the UNESCO register names the three most important and complete manuscripts of the "Song of the Nibelungs." The documents are kept at the Bavarian State Library in Munich, at Badische State Library in Karlsruhe and at the library at St. Gallen monastery in Switzerland.

Maine Folklife Center: an endangered friend
I first came to Orono in 1972 for what I thought would be a six-month stint volunteering in the folklore archives at the University of Maine. Back in Connecticut, my resolutely urban family was convinced I’d moved to northeast of nowhere and would be eaten by bears. The archives’ founder — Edward D. Ives to the library catalogue, Sandy to everyone else — had made a similar journey northward from New York City nearly 20 years earlier. He had had a job, teaching English at the university, awaiting him. It didn’t pay much, though, and he soon found himself trying to earn a little extra by singing folk songs to community groups.

Porn museum nestled in Las Vegas
As I arrive at the two-story building a few blocks west of the Vegas Strip, I spot a sign on the front door telling visitors that the building no long houses an adult bookstore. Those who came for that may be disappointed to discover that eroticism is viewed in a different light by the building's new tenants, who about a year ago opened the Erotic Heritage Museum. In typically atypical Vegas style, the museum is next to a strip club and just a G-string's throw from Donald Trump's glittering five-star hotel. Although porn is playing on several of the 45 flat-screen TVs, it's not being shown lasciviously in some darkened room. It's part of the museum's educational displays.

Lost Treasures of Timbuktu
But Timbuktu's manuscripts might just change that. The books date from between the 14th and 16th centuries, a time when the town was a thriving trading hub and intellectual center for West Africa. Now, scared that Timbuktu's 50,000 or so surviving books might disintegrate or be sold off to foreign collectors, African and Western organizations are racing to salvage the treasures, preserving them from the ravages of climate, dust and the passage of hundreds of years. Millions of dollars have been spent in laborious conservation and cataloguing of the works. A sleek new museum, completed last April, is scheduled to open to the public in November. The museum will display tens of thousands of Timbuktu's books to the world, and, its backers hope, shatter any lingering notion that Africa has no historic literary tradition of its own.

Russia Must Return Schneersohn Books
During the 1990s, the world was seized with stories of Nazi plunder and heirless property from the Holocaust era. Stolen bank accounts, looted artwork, confiscated real estate and payments for slave labor made front-page headlines, were the talk of congressional hearings and became the subject of international diplomacy. By the end of the decade, billions of dollars had been returned to Holocaust survivors and their heirs. Ten years later, however, the problem remains unresolved. Survivors received a measure of compensation for their loss and suffering, but some countries—like Russia—could be doing more, particularly by returning the vast collection of books and manuscripts of the late Rabbi Joseph Isaac Schneersohn.

Salsa musician Ruben Blades visits Harvard archive
Salsa musician and actor Ruben Blades celebrated his 61st birthday Thursday with a nostalgic visit to his archive collection at Harvard University. The seven-time Grammy winner looked through photos, held his old records and chuckled at his change in physical appearance during his first visit to the archive at the school where he earned a master's degree in international law in 1985. "Look at those sideburns," Blades said, looking at a photo of a show 30 years ago. The collection is composed of donations from fans and items that the university purchased on eBay, including a vinyl copy of "From Panama to New York" and a poster of Blades promoting childhood literacy. Blades also pledged to contribute personal items and rare recordings_ like a number with Michael Jackson in Spanish.

Abraham Lincoln Comes Alive at the California Museum
President Abraham Lincoln was a remarkable leader. The contents from his pockets reveal a humble and down-to-earth man. Two pairs of spectacles and a lens polisher, a pocket knife, a watch fob, a linen handkerchief, and a five-dollar Confederate note, these were the objects carried by Lincoln, the sixteenth President of the United States, when he was assassinated at Ford’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., on April 14, 1865. These are but a few of the items currently in a special exhibit at the California Museum in Sacramento. These items remained with the Lincoln family for more than 70 years after Lincoln’s death. Now, they join the nearly 200 artifacts as part of a special Lincoln collection belonging to the U.S. Library of Congress.

July 30, 2009

Obama taps librarian with Duke ties
A former head of Duke University Libraries has been chosen as the next archivist of the United States. On Tuesday, President Barack Obama announced the nomination of David Ferriero to run the National Archives and Records Administration. The 63-year-old Ferriero is the director of research libraries at the New York Public Library. From 1996 to 2004, he served as university librarian and vice provost for library affairs at Duke. When he left for New York, then-Duke President Nan Keohane called him "something of a Renaissance man, who combines a commitment to the life of the mind with a practical and collaborative approach."

Exhibit traces history of Hoover Institution with rich display of artifacts
It seems like an odd milestone — 90 years — for Stanford's Hoover Institution to burrow into its archives for a richly detailed exhibit that seeks to tell the story of how it all got started and why it still matters. Most groups might just wait for a more traditional centennial blowout. But 10 years shy? That would have been like celebrating America's bicentennial in 1966. But there's a good reason for the institution's timing, and it has much to do with one of the key aims of its retrospective exhibit: highlighting the special role played by the think tank's namesake and founder, President Herbert Hoover, until his death in 1964. At age 90.

Classic guide for writers marks 50th anniversary
Strunk’s “Elements of Style” probably would have vanished for good had not someone stolen one of the two copies in the Cornell library in 1957 and sent it to White. In his “Letter From the East” column for July 15, 1957, White trumpeted “the little book,” recalling its “rich deposits of gold” and eloquently ruminating on the valuable lessons he learned, lauding Strunk and his devotion to lucid English prose. Jack Case, an editor at Macmillan, was enticed by the column and eventually persuaded White to revise, expand and modernize Strunk’s book. Cornell’s archival holdings include White’s letters back and forth with Case about the project, as well as his original note-filled 1959 manuscript. Cornell also possesses three copies of Strunk’s original 1918 edition and White’s Underwood typewriter.

‘Moveable Feast’ Is Recast by Hemingway Grandson
Hemingway committed suicide before he could write that book. Seán [Hemingway], an associate curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art who had previously edited anthologies of Hemingway’s writings on war and hunting, worked with manuscripts now housed in the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston. His new edition, which will be in bookstores as early as this week, is made up of the 19 chapters that Hemingway wanted to include, in the order he had placed them. The remaining 10 chapters are moved into a section called “Additional Paris Sketches.”

"Pope's Library" to Reopen in 2010
The Vatican Library, which has been closed for renovation since July 14, 2007, will be opening its doors again in 2010. The library's prefect, Monsignor Cesare Pasini, announced this Sunday on Vatican Radio. On the occasion of the reopening, the first volume of a "History of the Vatican Library" will be published, he reported. As well, the prefect said, a congress will be organized, with a presentation by researchers who will explain their work over the past 50-60 years, and how the library is a place of investigation.

Help Us Catalog: University of Michigan’s Islamic Manuscripts Collection Going OnlineFrom the Article: The University of Michigan Special Collections Library needs help cataloguing its vast Islamic Manuscripts Collection. But the library doesn’t plan to hire an expert. Instead, almost all of its 1,250 pieces are being scanned in-house to put the work on the Internet. And the library hopes interested scholars will get involved. [Snip] “It will be presented to the public in Wiki or blog-type interface, so people can comment on what they see. In that way, we hope we can get help from scholars all over the world in identifying the manuscripts and cataloguing them properly,” said Peggy Daub, director of Special Collections.

Twitter helps prayers find their way to Wailing Wall
For centuries, people have stuffed prayers written on scraps of paper into the ancient cracks in the Western Wall in the Old City of Jerusalem. In recent years they could fax or e-mail their prayers — and now they can tweet them, too. The Western Wall now has its own address on the social networking service, Twitter, allowing believers around the globe to have their prayers placed between its 2,000 year-old-stones without leaving their armchairs. The service’s founder, Alon Nil, says petitioners can tweet their prayers, and they will be printed out and taken to the wall, where they will join the thousands of handwritten notes placed by visitors who believe their requests will find a shortcut to God by being deposited there.

Civil Rights Activists Champion Google Book Deal
A proposed settlement allowing Google to digitize millions of books will have huge benefits for minority populations and their access to valuable information, a group of civil rights leaders and educators said Wednesday. The Google book settlement, scheduled to be reviewed in an Oct. 7 court hearing, would allow Google to scan and make available scores of books, including millions of out-of-print titles. The digitized books will give minorities and poor people new access to titles that were formerly only available at large university libraries, supporters of the deal said during a forum at the Howard University School of Law in Washington, D.C.

A is for Acquisition, B is for British Library, C is for ConservationThe British Library has acquired the Macclesfield Alphabet Book, a rare medieval English 'model' or 'pattern' book dating from c.1500, with support from the National Heritage Memorial Fund (NHMF), independent charity The Art Fund, Friends of the British Library and National Libraries and other individual donors. The manuscript had been in the library of the Earl of Macclesfield since around 1750, and until recently its existence was completely unknown. From today (30 July), it will be on free public display in the Sir John Ritblat Gallery: Treasures of the British Library.

The last word: Unless a buyer emerges, Prairie Avenue Books will close
Prairie Avenue Books, a retail anchor on South Wabash Avenue and touchstone institution for architects in Chicago and around the globe, will close this September unless a buyer scoops up the entire business from longtime owners Marilyn and Wilbert Hasbrouck. The decision to close, Wilbert Hasbrouck said, came a few weeks ago and was prompted by concurrent economic issues and personal choices. “My wife and I have reached the age where we’re not up to coming here every day. There were a couple of other things, too. We couldn’t deal with the sales tax in Chicago,” he explained. “According to what we call the ‘Al Gore law,’ you don’t have to pay sales taxes if you buy on the Web.

July 29, 2009

Kerouac’s Mother’s Will Is a Fake, Judge Rules
In a ruling that could have implications for the literary estate of Jack Kerouac (above right, in 1967), a Florida judge has ruled that the will of Kerouac’s mother, Gabrielle Kerouac, was a forgery, The Associated Press reported. When he died in 1969, Kerouac, the Beat Generation author, left his estate to his mother, who in turn left it to Kerouac’s third wife, Stella Sampas.

Back to font: medieval alphabet book stays in Britain after appeal
A unique alphabet book, offering a selection of spectacular and bizarre fonts to the luxury medieval manuscript illuminator stuck for inspiration, has been bought by the British Library after a £600,000 appeal. The importance of the small manuscript, dating from 1500 but concealed within an 18th-century binding, had been missed for the centuries as it sat unrecognised in the Earl of Macclesfield's library. The British Library mounted a public appeal to keep the alphabet book and finally bought it with help from the National Heritage Memorial Fund, and the Art Fund charity.

Anonymous No More
"Pen and Parchment: Drawing in the Middle Ages" is the most original museum show in this country since 2002's "Tapestry in the Renaissance: Art and Magnificence." These audacious exhibitions turn scholarly probity into artistic revelation; it speaks volumes about the curatorial esprit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that this great institution has been responsible for both events. "Tapestry in the Renaissance," which made a definitive case for the centrality of woven images in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century European art, was the defining moment in the career of Thomas Campbell, a relatively untested curator who is now the director of the Metropolitan. It is anyone's guess where the curator Melanie Holcomb will be in seven years, but there is no doubt that with this new, gorgeously focused show, she has reframed the place of drawing in the history of European art.

Universities putting state archives about migration online
A yellowed brochure for one Cross Triangle Ranch seems, at first, like it could be for any Arizona getaway: The pamphlet touts the ranch's fresh air, abundant sunshine and wealth of outdoor activities. It also advertises the resort's low rates - $25 per week, $30 with horse - and warns: "POSITIVELY NO TUBERCULARS ACCEPTED," a nod to the tuberculosis scare at the time it was printed, nearly 100 years ago. This, along with hundreds of other items, is one of the first pieces of history to be archived in a project called "Why Arizona?," a collaborative effort among the three state universities to digitally archive migration-related materials in time for the Arizona centennial in 2012.

New York Harbor Quadricentennial Saluted with Extensive Exhibition Featuring Rarely Seen TreasuresThe New York Public Library celebrates Henry Hudson and Dutch acumen with Mapping New York's Shoreline, 1609-2009, a comprehensive exhibition featuring rare and extraordinary maps, atlases, books, journals, broadsides, manuscripts, prints, and an animation superimposing historical maps on a three-dimensional Google Earth model drawn primarily from the Library’s Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, and from other New York Public Library collections. Mapping New York’s Shoreline will be on view at The New York Public Library’s Stephen A. Schwarzman Building at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street from September 25, 2009 to June 26, 2010.

Clarence Darrow's love letters revealed
Jordan Luttrell, the president of Meyer Boswell Books in San Francisco, had previously managed an acquisition of 340 letters written by Darrow. Many were addressed to Darrow's son, Paul, and more than 100 letters were written to Darrow from people such as Helen Keller, Sinclair Lewis and Upton Sinclair. The Clarence Darrow Archive was purchased by the University of Minnesota Law Library in 2004. [Elva Hamerstrom] Paulson was referred to Luttrell, who, with Minneapolis attorney Randy Tietjen, spent a weekend at Paulson and her husband Dale's home in Roseburg examining the collection. According to Paulson, a pile of gold on the table would have excited them less.

Booksellers' Alley a little-known literary hub
Local book buffs have been enjoying a little-known downtown browsing treat on recent weekends. They've been gathering outdoors, at a convivial strip just beside Montreal's indoor mecca for book lovers, the Grande Bibliothèque, near Berri-UQÀM métro. Now, their destination just got better. The fledgling Booksellers' Alley has added a third day, Sunday, on a trial basis. Since May 15, the outdoor strip has been bringing the joys of rare and used books, calligraphy, rare maps, postcards, engravings, the art of book-binding and other variations of the print revolution wrought by Gutenberg to Montrealers and tourists.

History By The Book: Moe's Books, the Well-Known Local Vendor of Used Volumes, Commemorates a Half Century of Business
A native of Queens, New York, Moe Moskowitz and his wife Barbara opened the first Moe's Books on Shattuck Avenue in 1959 but soon moved the store to its present neighborhood. A true eccentric, Moskowitz became a legendary figure in Berkeley. He could often be found behind the counter, smoking his characteristic cigar, loudly singing his favorite songs or examining the books that a potential seller had brought in for inspection, according to John Wong, an antiquarian expert who has worked at the store for 30 years.

Will bookshops be left on the shelf?
[Alan] Warnock has put his finger on the great advantage of online book-buying: that it's speedy but, more important, that you can get your hands on out-of-print, specialist, hard-to-find titles that retail bookshops no longer stock. At the same time, second-hand and antiquarian books are a profitable area for retailers who would find it hard to compete with the heavily discounted prices offered by Amazon for many popular titles. Indeed, the antiquarian area is where bookselling first developed an online presence, as ABE press and publicity manager Richard Davies explains. When ABE co-founder Cathy Waters tried to track down books for her customers in the Dark Ages, ie 1995, she "would put an advertisement in a book listings magazine and other booksellers would write back weeks later and say they had one. It was a terrible process. So her husband who was working in IT for the government in British Columbia said: "Well, why not put the two together?" And the rest is history. "Who would have thought that old books would be the perfect match for the internet?" Davies enthuses. Indeed.

July 28, 2009

Rare books now available through deal between U. Michigan and Amazon
On Tuesday, university libraries revealed plans to make 400,000 out-of-copyright books in their collection available for reprint on demand through a partnership with BookSurge. The books, which the university expects to make available later this summer, will range from $10 to $45. The reprint program will expand the university's relationship with online seller Amazon.com, which has been offering a limited selection of books to the university for about five years. The agreement between the university and Amazon states that the program will last two years. Dean of Libraries Paul Courant said the project would focus mainly on works published prior to 1923 because they are no longer protected under copyright law. Courant added that the project would slowly add more recent out-of-print and out-of-copyright books.

Amazon deal to reprint rare books
Online retailer Amazon is teaming up with the University of Michigan to provide reprints of 400,000 rare, out-of-print and out-of-copyright books. The books from the university's library are in more than 200 languages from Acoli to Zulu and include an 1860 book on nursing by Florence Nightingale. Amazon's Book Surge unit will print the books in soft-cover editions at prices from $10(£6) to $45. It comes as the Ann Arbor college seeks to digitise its book collection. Financial details of the tie-up arrangement have not been revealed.

Jeff Bezos apologizes for Kindle gaffe
Attempting to turn the page (so to speak) on a messy chapter in Amazon's corporate history, CEO Jeff Bezos has officially apologized for the way the company handled the removal of unauthorized content on Kindle devices which the company had already sold to its customers. Over the past two weeks Amazon has been facing bitter criticism for its decision to delete without warning several titles which had been uploaded to the site for sale on the Kindle e-book platform. It turns out that those who uploaded the books didn't have the rights to sell them, and Amazon summarily deleted the titles from their store and from the devices of those who had already downloaded them, taking with them their notes and annotations in some cases. Cries of Big Brother were immediate and angry -- particularly since one of the titles deleted was George Orwell's 1984.

Forgotten Bookmarks: A bookseller blogs bits left in booksForgotten Bookmarks blog, via MeFi. I work at a used and rare bookstore, and I buy books from people everyday. These are the personal, funny, heartbreaking and weird things I find in those books. (Librarians would have such collections, too. Or must they throw them away? Shhh... ) David left a letter from Julia in "The Remains of the Day" by Kazuo Ishiguro. The letter begins,

Dearest David, I am returning the beautiful necklace you gave me - not as a gesture if finality of our friendship, but because it is a special token in your family and I could not in good conscience keep it....

July 24, 2009

Previously unpublished Graham Greene novel to be serialized
It has not been decided who will finish the story. “We want to make sure the estate of Greene is happy with the outcome of this,” Gulli says. “There will either be a reader's contest or a writer will be commissioned to conclude the story.” Strand’s summer issue, containing the first chapter of The Empty Chair, has already been released and will be available until September. Of the response so far, Gulli notes, “The reaction has been overwhelming. Greene is still very much in demand and it's my hope that this will help introduce a new generation of readers to his work.”

At 90, Bauhaus Gets a Fresh Retrospective
Ninety years ago, Walter Gropius founded an interdisciplinary school in Weimar with the objective of developing a “total” work that would unite all of the design disciplines — architecture, graphic design, and typography — under one aesthetic vision. The Bauhaus school became one of the most important in modern history: its legacy can still be seen everywhere from your Ikea kitchen set to the Manhattan skyline. To celebrate the anniversary, the three largest Bauhaus research institutions and museums in Germany, in cooperation with the Museum of Modern Art in New York (a sister exhibit runs there from Nov. 8 to Jan. 25), will host “Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model”, running through Oct. 4. The exhibit will take place in the Martin-Gropius-Bau (Niederkirchnerstrasse 7; 805-999-62-37-70), a beautiful Renaissance-style building in central Berlin designed by Walter Gropius’s great uncle in the 1870s.

A Bubbling Font of Creativity: Oded Ezer and His Hebrew Designs
Despite its ubiquity, type design is easy to overlook; it’s the meaning of words that usually matters, not their appearance. Courtesy Oded EzerFlesh Made Word: From corporate logos to personal posters, Oded Ezer is bringing type to life.But for Oded Ezer, an Israeli artist and type designer, typography lends a whole other life to language. In his work, which has appeared in museums and won design competitions worldwide, letters aren’t static symbols but living, growing, breathing beings. “The Typographer’s Guide to the Galaxy” (Die Gestalten Verlag), a new book showcasing his designs, provides a sampling of his functional and experimental work, his corporate logos and sketchbook drawings, and projects so strange that they defy classification.

A Wilde discovery of letters
He may have excelled at the unexpected, but even Oscar Wilde himself would have to bow down to this delicious irony. Several of Wilde’s working drafts and personal letters were thought, by scholars, to have been lost for over half a century, until a gift to the Morgan Library and Museum in New York revealed otherwise, writes Belinda McKeon. Here were the drafts, nine of them in all, and here along with them were four precious letters, comprising some 50 pages of handwritten Wilde, beautifully bound in a red leather volume. And here, on the cover of that volume, stamped in gilt, was the coat of arms of the family which had cared enough to seek out those manuscripts and letters, to bring them together and to keep them so elegantly intact: the winged horses and the proud shield of the Marquess of Queensberry.

Getty Museum Exhibition to Trace Perceptions of Aztec Culture
Drawing primarily on the collections of the Museo Nacional de Antropología and the Museo del Templo Mayor in Mexico City, the exhibition will also feature the Sahagún’s Florentine Codex from the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence, and 16th to 18th-century works relating to Mexico from the Getty Research Institute’s Special Collections. “European response to pre-Columbian and colonial-era Latin America has long been a focus of collecting for the Getty Research Institute,” says Lyons. “Its rich holdings on Mexico show how remarkable Aztec objects were 'translated' by Europeans.”

Razor-Gang Blues
The NLA has always had a perception problem, being seen by government as a place that just keeps old stuff. Indeed, the library recently learned that its print collection stretched 300 years further back than was thought. A collection of Chinese artefacts it acquired in 1961 included a volume of woodblock-printed sutras dated 1162; a question mark was added because nobody could believe it. Three painstaking authentications later, it can be given an 846th birthday party and, thanks to the extra plant fibre in period Chinese paper, looks fit for many happy returns. But it is not such relics that tax the NLA most: it is the cornucopia of digital materials in technologies dying almost as soon as they are born.

Volunteers match names to faces in USI archiving project
"We're getting these (photos) ready for digitization. Hopefully by the end of next month we'll have the Rice Library Image Collection up and running, and the public will be able to view these images," said Jennifer Greene, reference and archives librarian. The photos will have description fields that will enable more than 30 names to be added to each photo. The photos also will have the ability to be searched based on the names in the description fields.

Letter: Haverhill is losing a precious resource
To the editor: I'm writing from New York City and I just received bad news from the librarian at the Haverhill library. Recently, I wrote to the Haverhill library requesting help with information regarding Charles Wesley Bradley, who died on Sept. 22, 1884. He was buried in a quiet cemetery in Haverhill. The reply I received from the librarian is disheartening. Here is what she wrote me: "We regret to inform you that due to severe budget cuts the library has closed its Special Collections Department. The library can no longer accept telephone, e-mail, or standard mail requests for research pertaining to local history, genealogy, the Gale Art Collection, and archived microfilm or microfiche.

July 22, 2009

'The Cocom Codex': A Rare Document Sparks Intrigue in the Yucatan
What would you do if one day you received something in the mail that would forever change the course of your life? "The Cocom Codex" (published by iUniverse) by Nelson Reed details the adventures of one such archeologist as he and a cast of others in Yucatan struggle to claim a valuable and rare Maya document as their own. Out of the blue, Stuart Walker opens his mail to find a photo and letter from a childhood friend, inviting him to bid on the Cocom Codex. Though Stuart's tenure as a professor at Washington University is a bit shaky, in part because of his drinking problem, he drops everything and leaves for Yucatan immediately, hoping the document will revive his once promising career. Also vying for the prized artifact are Catherine Pilkington, a fellow archeology professor who believes her mediocre career has been curtailed by the old-boy network, and Peter Van Raemdonck, an unscrupulous dealer who specializes in pre-Colombian Mexican art.

Amazon deal to reprint rare books
Online retailer Amazon is teaming up with the University of Michigan to provide reprints of 400,000 rare, out-of-print and out-of-copyright books. The books from the university's library are in more than 200 languages from Acoli to Zulu and include a 1898 book on nursing by Florence Nightingale. Amazon's Book Surge unit will print the books in soft-cover editions at prices from $10(£6) to $45. It comes as the Ann Arbor college seeks to digitise its book collection. Financial details of the tie-up arrangement have not been revealed.

A good read: Bringing the Bible’s scattered pages together online
At a British Library conference to launch the website, the monastery brought the exciting news of a “new new find”. A few months ago, a Greek doctoral student, Nikolaos Sarris, was examining the binding on an 18th-century Greek manuscript when he spotted that pasted to the backboard was a piece of writing that might once have been part of the Codex. It has since been confirmed that the fragment, part of the book of Joshua, almost certainly came from there. Does the fragment’s use for book-binding imply a lack of respect for the Codex? Far from it, says Nicholas Pickwoad, a conservator who knows St Catherine’s. An Italian traveller in the 18th century noted that the text, or at least the vast bulk of it that remained in good order, was treasured by the monks; if a page was reused, that was only because the writing had become damaged. It was the spiritual message, not the gold letters or the vellum, that the monks revered.

Da Vinci's Atlantic Code goes on display in Milan
Leonardo Da Vinci's Atlantic Code, seen containing the widest range of the Renaissance genius's ideas, will go on display from September in a show taking six years to see all 1,119 pages. Milan gave a taster for the full show on Friday, showing off two pages of the code, original name Codex Atlanticus, in the city hall. The full exhibition will run up to Milan's international Expo in 2015. "There are different types of pages, some just writing and including the writer telling fables and funny stories as well as engineering designs and cooking recipes," Don Francesco Braschi of Milan's Ambrosiana Library, the Code's home, told Reuters.

Rare sixteenth century book finds new home at John Rylands Library
The John Rylands University Library has acquired a priceless collection of books, some of which date back 500 years. St Mary's Church in Nantwich housed the library, however its location, which could only be reached via a narrow spiral staircase, meant that it was all but inaccessible. The council of St Mary's Church were concerned about the deterioration of the books and took the decision to gift them to the John Rylands University Library to enable them to be stored safely and made available for viewing.

Harry Potter book to raise thousands
It was sitting neglected at a second-hand bookshop, but now a rare first edition Harry Potter book is expected to conjure up thousands of pounds when it casts a spell on eager bidders at an auction in Norwich. The auction, being held at St Andrews Hall from 9am tomorrow , is expected to attract scores of fans who are eager to bag the copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone. Auctioneer Gary Barnes said that the client, a book collector who did not want to be named, was browsing a second-hand book sale in Dereham when he spotted the book on sale for just 99p.

Rare antique, collectible books on sale at Spring Hill library
A special section with rare, antique, autographed, and collectible books adds a new twist to the Friends of the Spring Hill Library's book sale 9 a.m.– 3 p.m. Saturday at 144 Kedron Pkwy. The quarterly sales already include a wide selection of adult and children's books, videos, DVD's and books on tape for $1 per item or 50 cents per paperback book, which help raise about $4,000 over the year for the library. This time around, the sale also includes about 200 more valuable books for sale that go up in price from $5 to $100 per title. "They were just collecting dust," head librarian Gail Adkins said. "We thought 'why not use them to raise money for the library?'"

July 21, 2009

Shopping for Rare Space Stuff on the Lunar-Landing Anniversary
Why not honor the 40th birthday of walking on the moon by spending lots of money on space memorabilia? Buzz Aldrin’s bright orange training suit used to prepare for his Gemini 12 flight in 1966 and for the big one, the Apollo 11 mission nearly three years later. “An exceptional and unique item in fine condition. Price is $40,000 from a Bauman Rare Books catalogue. Also available from the Bauman space catalogue: a photograph taken on the moon during Apollo11 signed by all 12 astronauts who walked on the moon. Only about two dozen of such photos are said to exist, says Bauman. Fine condition, $29,500.

Purdue exhibit to celebrate 40th anniversary of lunar landing
Mementos, artifacts and personal papers from Neil Armstrong, Eugene Cernan and other Purdue astronaut alumni will be on display July 20 to Oct. 30 as the university celebrates its rich space heritage and the 40th anniversary of the historic first walk on the moon. Purdue Libraries’ Archives and Special Collections will present the exhibit “Purdue’s Place in Space: From the Midwest to the Moon.” The exhibit, which is free and open to the public, will be on display in the new Virginia Kelly Karnes Archives & Special Collections Research Center on the fourth floor of the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Education Library in Stewart Center.

How to Find a Missing Masterpiece
Discoveries of unknown works by classical masters seem commonplace these days, with manuscripts by the likes of Bach, Vivaldi, Mozart and Beethoven popping up in library files and private collections with surprising frequency. Often though, amid all the excitement and bankable headlines, the artistic payoffs turn out to be minimal, or the claims greatly exaggerated: Witness the overblown and specious claims made about a spate of so-called Mendelssohn “world premieres” in New York recently. But a new release on Naxos of a forgotten work, “Song of the Stars” by the esteemed Spanish composer Enrique Granados, is real cause for celebration.

Codex Sinaiticus, the world's oldest Bible, unified online for the first time in over a century
The surviving sections of the world’s oldest Bible have been pieced together and unified online Monday, creating a unique opportunity for scholars to learn more about the centuries-old manuscript. As part of a four-year joint project, the Codex Sinaiticus, has been digitized for the first time, reuniting sections held by the British Library in London, the Monastery of St. Catherine in Sinai, Egypt, the National Library of Russia and Leipzig University Library in Germany, according to Reuters.

Getty displays medieval manuscripts focusing on King David
So large loomed his legend that throughout the Middle Ages David was credited with being the author of the 150 Psalms, the deeply affecting "songs of praise" initially composed in Hebrew, that were incorporated into the Hebrew Bible and later the Christian Bible. The Psalms played a vital role in medieval devotion from about 500 to the 1500s, and David's image appears in lavishly illustrated Psalters, volumes containing the Book of Psalms, and choir books of the period. Many of these manuscripts, painted in brilliant hues and decorated with gold leaf, are on view through Aug. 16 in the Getty Museum's North Pavilion.

Inking a tattoo -- and a writing career
The Sea Tramp has a reference library. It's in the back, not far from the banner for the High Rollers, the roller derby team Johnson's wife skates for as Candy Warhole. Most shops have books on hand to research designs and make sure, for example, the state flag a Marine wants on his bicep is from Texas and not Tennessee. Johnson says he doesn't know a daffodil from a lilac but loves art and is a serious book collector. He pulls out a French book about aquariums and another on the language of flowers. A friend, rare book dealer Charles Seluzicki, helped him build his collection and helped him on his path toward becoming a writer by suggesting he turn his stories into what became "Tattoo Machine." "That book was born in our house one Christmas night," Seluzicki says. "Jeff started telling stories and had everyone in stitches."

Rare manuscripts remain locked for want of key
Though the old records of erstwhile Bettiah Raj have been acquired by the government yet no document has been transferred to it so far. At Bettiah, besides old Raj records, more than 1,000 rare books and reports regarding census and linguistic survey of India are stored. No official is posted there to look after the old archival records at Darbhanga and Bhagalpur regional centres. The situation in record rooms in six other districts is more or less the same, the director said. No financial auditing has been done at the state headquarters of the 55-year-old state archives for the last 14 years. It is essential to conduct financial auditing of the state archives without any delay for which a separate letter has been sent to the finance department by Kumar.

Academy of Natural Sciences part of huge digital imaging project
It's not every day that an 18-year-old art student has the opportunity to work with some of the rarest and most beautiful images ever created. Yet here at the Academy of Natural Sciences is Stephanie Zuppo, a Moore College of Art sophomore, affixed to a tall stool, at her feet an enormous volume bathed in brilliant light. She focuses on a flower - a rose, possibly the first rendering of that particular variation of flora - and carefully adjusts her scanner. An image originally created at around 1800 by Pierre Joseph Redouté, the great Belgian painter and botanist, is about to enter the universe of digital electronics, invisibly passing into machinery and onto gold compact discs, eventually into various databases and then out to the virtual world, available to anyone.

Preserving the past: WPI pursues time through archives
Worcester Polytechnic Institute will get help in preserving its oldest artifacts from aging and decay. The George C. Gordon Library has recently received books and online resources from the Institute of Museum and Library Services through its program, Connecting to Collections: A Call to Action. Called The Bookshelf, the resources include information on caring for old collections. “The Bookshelf is for supporting the preservation work for our collections. We have so much diverse material — from old football films, photographs, sculptures, drawings and even old computer games,” said Kathleen Markees, conservation librarian at WPI.

Author Geraldine Brooks sheds light on 'People'
The clues were all there -- accidents of history -- hiding inside the ancient book: an insect wing, wine stains, salt crystals, a white hair. Geraldine Brooks, author of "People of the Book," served them up for her heroine Hanna Heath to discover. They, in turn, revealed bit by bit the 600-year journey of a rare manuscript so beloved that people risked their safety for its survival. The clues and Hanna Heath are Brooks' creations. What Brooks didn't imagine was the book itself, a medieval Hebrew text called the Sarajevo Haggadah, renowned for its "illuminated" artwork.

The Angel’s Game
But while Martín might be sarcastic about writing as a career, Zafón is nothing short of reverent about books. “The Angel’s Game” is bursting with homages to Dickens, Defoe, and Dumas, and is the kind of novel where librarians are witty sirens and the good guys are an antiquarian book dealer and a crusty newspaper editor “who did not suffer fools and who subscribed to the theory that the liberal use of adverbs and adjectives was the mark of a pervert or someone with a vitamin deficiency.”

July 18, 2009

Nation Building
Many book collectors and curators would give all their first editions for Mark Dimunation’s job. Since 1998, Dimunation has served as chief of the Library of Congress’s Rare Books and Special Collections Division. It is the largest rare book collection in North America, housed in the largest library in the world, a “huge theme park of materials,” as he describes it. The division contains some 850,000 items—including Charles Dickens’ walking stick, the contents of Abraham Lincoln’s pockets on the night he was assassinated, and The Bay Psalm Book, published in 1640, the first book printed in what became the United States.

Google Books or Great Books?
In 2006 Kevin Kelley of Wired wrote in the New York Times that very soon “all the books in the world” will “become a single liquid fabric of interconnected words and ideas”. Counter-arguments were not slow in coming. One of the best-informed, most thorough, and most truly passionate came, not surprisingly, from Anthony Grafton: first in the pages of the New Yorker, then – expanded and documented – as a pamphlet, Codex in Crisis, published last year by the Crumpled Press; and now as the culminating essay in Worlds Made by Words, a collection of mostly recent essays dealing with aspects of the Republic of Letters (once a real, if virtual, humanist society) from the Renaissance to the present day.

Rare 1502 hymnal given to UK university library
A church is donating a rare 1502 hymnal to a Manchester University library, where church members say it can receive better care. The Latin hymnal was published in London by Wynken de Worde, who was among the first to popularize printed works. The hymnal will be stored at The John Rylands University Library along with a trove of other books that have been kept in a church tower in the town of Nantwich since about 1695. The library at St. Mary's Church, one of many set up in parish churches around England, apparently was well used for about a century before falling into neglect. "We have long worried that the books were deteriorating. The staff at The University of Manchester will be able to conserve them and store them in the correct conditions," said Rick Appleton, a church member.

NEWS: AIGA Announces Best In Communication Design And Book Design
All 2008 selections will be featured in upcoming traveling exhibitions beginning at the AIGA National Design Center this fall, publication in the thirtieth edition of the AIGA design annual 365: AIGA Year in Design, and included in the AIGA Design Archives both online and at the Denver Art Museum. With a history stretching back 85 years, the "AIGA 50 Books/50 Covers Competition" has long been the source of identifying the best work in book design. All works selected for the competition this year will be added to the Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Columbia University, in addition to being documented in the AIGA annual and included in the AIGA Design Archives.

Limited Edition of Ted Kennedy’s Memoirs Will Cost $1,000
At a time when publishers are scrambling to keep customers willing to pay $26 for a hardcover book instead of $9.99 for an electronic version, the publisher of Senator Edward M. Kennedy’s forthcoming memoir is going in the opposite direction - issuing a limited edition it plans to sell for $1,000 a copy. Twelve, an imprint of Grand Central Publishing, is planning to issue 1,000 copies of a leather-bound, electronically signed edition of “True Compass” and sell the books through the Web site of the Hachette Book Group, the parent company of Grand Central.

July 01, 2009

John James Audubon subject of NEH-funded 'Picturing America' institute at IU Bloomington
One particular problem with looking back at Audbon's writings, [Christoph] Irmscher said, is that although his body of writing was vast initially, his writings were censored by his granddaughter, particularly the journals. "She destroyed some and ended up rewriting others out of a notion of Victorian propriety," he said. Much of the institute will take place at IU's Lilly Library, one of the foremost repositories of rare books and manuscripts in the world and home to unparalleled Audubon resources, among them a pristine set of Audubon's Double Elephant Folio of Birds of America and an early, paper-wrapped edition of the Royal Octavo edition of the same work.

Mapping Manchester exhibition
The University of Manchester's John Rylands Library is displaying a unique collection of Manchester maps in a new exhibition. Mapping Manchester – Cartographic Stories of the City shows material from the University of Manchester, Manchester City Library and Archives, Chetham's Library and the Manchester Geographical Society. The 80 maps featured in the exhibition have been unseen in public for up to 200 years.

NYC Museum Features Bowne Stationers
New York was the center of the letterpress printing industry during the 19th century. Printing offices and "job shops" clustered between Park Row and Fulton Street. Along the north-south streets crossing them were paper suppliers, newspapers, type foundries, book binders, and ink makers. Bowne & Co., Stationers, a part of the South Street Seaport Museum, resembles a typical job shop of the late 1870's. The space would have been rather dim and lit by gas. Printing was done on presses that were powered by a treadle that had to be pumped with the foot. The shop employees had to hand-pick each piece of metal type to hand-set the text.

Lost in Cyberspace
That’s because on June 8 Scripps made the jubilant announcement that it was finalizing an agreement with the Denver Public Library “to ensure responsible stewardship of the storied newspaper’s archives and artifacts.” The library “would assume ownership of the Rocky’s voluminous archives, including all digital and paper newspaper clipping files,” while the Colorado Historical Society would receive “such other artifacts as signs, photographs, special editions, artwork and other information that documents the history of the Rocky.” [John] Temple assumed that “archives” and “digital files” meant that the entire contents of the Rocky’s site would be preserved by the library. But they won’t. Jim Kroll, who as head of the library’s department of western history and genealogy is receiving the Scripps bequest, tells me the library’s going to get “photos that appeared in the paper, photos that are outtakes, PDFs of the newspaper for the past four years, streaming video, some other things I’m not quite sure of yet.”

Hemingway grandson publishes revised version of A Moveable Feast
Ernest Hemingway's classic memoir of his time in Paris in the 1920s, A Moveable Feast, has been reworked by his grandson to give "a much better impression of what he was trying to accomplish". The first version of the posthumous memoir was published in 1964 – three years after the death of its author – edited by Hemingway's fourth wife, Mary. Now his grandson, Seán Hemingway, has edited a new edition, which includes previously unpublished sketches of Hemingway's life in Paris, including moments with his first wife Hadley and his son Jack, irreverent portraits of F Scott Fitzgerald and Ford Madox Ford, and Hemingway's memories of his early attempts at writing. A Moveable Feast: The Restored Edition will be published by Scribner in the US next month, with a foreword by Hemingway's only surviving son, Patrick.

A blessing for Obama from the American Jewish community
US President Barack Obama is about to receive a unique gift. Shlomo Perelman, owner of judaism.com, has spent the past six months assembling a prayer scroll for the president, made up of over 3,000 personalized blessings that constituents submitted between December 26 and January 31. The idea came to Perelman after he heard about a gift presented to president-elect Abraham Lincoln by the head of the Jewish community of Chicago in 1861 - an American flag on which tailor Abraham Kohn had embroidered the opening verses of the Book of Joshua, including the words "be strong and of good courage."

Another Gandhi auction, bidders still at wits' end
Thanks to a loophole left by the government after the last auction of Gandhi memorabilia held four months ago in New York, Indian collectors will again be at a disadvantage at the next one due on July 14 in London. For, the reform introduced after the New York controversy is limited to "antiques of an age exceeding 100 years", although none of the available Gandhi belongings is that old. The exclusion of items that may be younger but are of no less "historical interest" will hamper Indian bidders at Sotheby's on July 14 when it will auction the belongings not just of Gandhi but also of Nehru.

Bill of treason found in university archives
Archivists at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont. have discovered a bill of treason, written on parchment against one William Rogers for taking up arms with William Lyon MacKenzie in the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837. "In Canadian history the rebellions of Upper and Lower Canada are an important passage in what happened in Canada at that time," the director of archives and research at McMaster University, Carl Spadoni, said Tuesday. "William Lyon MacKenzie organized a number of people, farmers and others, hoping to take over the government ... but the rebellion was quashed."

Russia won't participate in Jewish documents suit
Russia told a U.S. court on Friday that judges have no authority to tell the country how to handle sacred Jewish documents held in its state library that were seized by the Nazi and Soviet armies. The documents are at the center of a lawsuit brought by members of Chabad-Lubavitch, which follows the teachings of Eastern European rabbis and emphasizes the study of the Torah. The group is suing Russia in U.S. court to recover thousands of manuscripts, prayers, lectures and philosophical discourses by leading rabbis dating back to the 18th century.

For the moment | Donatella Versace
Then there is the shopping. I adore Argosy, a bookstore on East 59th Street that sells rare books, prints and maps, and I always go there to stock up on art books.